The Dead Ptarmigan (Self-Portrait) – William Orpen

Orpen painted himself holding a dead bird and called it a self-portrait. That tells you everything about him.

The Dead Ptarmigan was painted around 1909, when Orpen was at the peak of his reputation — the most in-demand portraitist in the British Isles, earning more than almost any painter of his generation. He could have painted himself in a studio, brush in hand, the picture of success. Instead he chose this: a limp ptarmigan, a direct stare, the whole thing drenched in the tradition of Dutch vanitas painting. He even noted, with characteristic dryness, that "we grow ptarmigans in the West."

It is a painting about mortality, about the gap between reputation and reality, about what it means to be Irish and successful and slightly apart from it all. Nobody else was making work like this in Ireland in 1909.

The original hangs in the National Gallery of Ireland. This archival giclée print is made on heavyweight fine art paper with fade-resistant inks, built to last.

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